/ average assets

Average Net worth in 401k

I was reading a post by financial samurai and I notice he did a screenshot of this personal capital account.

Impressive!! 2 Million. And he's not working. He's about 40. I'm nowhere that and I've been working non-stop since I'm 24. I do have a lot of my money stuck in housing equity though.

That's a legit financial blogger account

I went back and double check how much should I really have in my retirement account. Here's what I came up with by age.

Average 401k balance

Here's a table for the ideal 401k sum with different annual return (3%, 5% and 7%).

Age 401k contributions 3.00% 5.00% 7.00%
24 18000 $18,000.00 $18,000.00 $18,000.00
25 18000 $36,540.00 $36,900.00 $37,260.00
26 18000 $55,636.20 $56,745.00 $57,868.20
27 18000 $75,305.29 $77,582.25 $79,918.97
28 18000 $95,564.44 $99,461.36 $103,513.30
29 18000 $116,431.38 $122,434.43 $128,759.23
30 18000 $137,924.32 $146,556.15 $155,772.38
31 18000 $160,062.05 $171,883.96 $184,676.45
32 18000 $182,863.91 $198,478.16 $215,603.80
33 18000 $206,349.83 $226,402.07 $248,696.06
34 18000 $230,540.32 $255,722.17 $284,104.79
35 18000 $255,456.53 $286,508.28 $321,992.12
36 18000 $281,120.23 $318,833.69 $362,531.57
37 18000 $307,553.83 $352,775.38 $405,908.78
38 18000 $334,780.45 $388,414.14 $452,322.40
39 18000 $362,823.86 $425,834.85 $501,984.96
40 18000 $391,708.58 $465,126.59 $555,123.91
41 18000 $421,459.84 $506,382.92 $611,982.59
42 18000 $452,103.63 $549,702.07 $672,821.37
43 18000 $483,666.74 $595,187.17 $737,918.86
44 18000 $516,176.74 $642,946.53 $807,573.18
45 18000 $549,662.05 $693,093.86 $882,103.30

This table assumes you start working at 24 years old and you max your 401k contributions. It does not include any employer matching.

Since I'm approaching 39, you can see at the high end (7% annual return) I should have more than ~500k$. I am actually close to the lower end, perhaps because I only started contributing to my US based account at 28 (the year I moved to the US).

My hope is that I can catch up with after-tax 401k contributions. You can see with this post how much a super saver can contribute to his 401k account. Super saver's guide to retirement contributions